Australian TTRPG creator Ethan Hayward has made Elden Ring DnD races you can use in your next campaign, as part of a homebrew project that aims to bring the entirety of the Lands Between to Dungeons and Dragons 5e
Of course, the Elden Ring video game doesn’t have playable races the way many RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 does, so various monsters have been adapted and fleshed out to make quite the oddball DnD races list. There’s the Human 5e of course, adapted with various subraces from the game’s setting, then there’s the frog-faced Albinaurics, bestial Demi-humans, the Man-serpents and Living Jars.
Hayward had already created a new DnD 5e spells list, and adapted the Ashes of War, before creating the Elden Ring races. He says the project began when he considered “how would Sites of Grace work in DnD?” and then spiraled from there.
“I knew 5e would be a good (but not perfect) fit for Elden Ring, as both 5e and Elden Ring are focused on combat and have some shared tropes, items and systems, like spells, magic weapons, damage types, etc,” Hayward explains.
“And Elden Ring’s world is an amazing one to immerse oneself in – playing it as a tabletop roleplaying game would allow people to explore aspects of the lore and experience it in ways made impossible by a video game.”
Experiencing the world as anything but a human, as Hayward’s supplement allows, is one example of this. Now you can go mad in the dark as a Demi-human, attack with spirits as an Omen, or – Hayward’s favorite feature – perform a spinning slam attack as a Living Jar.
He adds that it took some work to tease out details about the various denizens of the Elden Ring setting. “A lot of them (e.g the Numen) are one or two sentences in-game, mentioned in an item or two, or even just character appearance presets like the Draconian. So it was more challenging than expected to squeeze out some ideas from what little information FromSoftware gives us about certain things.”
With the races complete, Hayward plans to make DnD magic items for his Elden Ring supplement. Once complete, he plans to release all the content in one big PDF compendium.
“Honestly, I’d love to make this as its own TTRPG separated from 5th edition D&D, to really emphasize Elden Ring’s mechanics, but I believe an official tabletop adaptation is on its way,” he says. “So unless FromSoftware decides to hire me, I’ll continue on with this project, which will always be freely available.”
For more DnD content, check out this creator of DnD maps, who’s converted Dark Souls’ Undead Burg to a 2d plane. And don’t miss our complete guide to every DnD class in the game.